New Defender's Study Bible Notes

16:25since the world began. Our word “mystery” comes from the Greek musterion, which referred to the secrets imparted only to initiates in the famous “mystery religions” of ancient Greece. Paul used the word some twenty times in his epistles, adapting this concept to the great purposes of God for His creation, planned before the foundation of the world but only revealed to His initiates, as it were, in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4). The gospel of Christ, revealed in its completeness to Paul (Galatians 1:11,12), had been foreshadowed in many ways through the prophets, but finally became reality in human experience, when God became man, in Christ. Note also such passages as Ephesians 3:1-11 and Colossians 1:24-27.